"Premises Rule" broadly construed: Appellate Division finds that an employee struck by a car on a public street while walking to her workplace from an employer-controlled parking garage is eligible for benefits.

The respondent assigned the petitioner free parking at a private garage located two blocks from her workplace. The respondent paid for parking spaces for its employees at this private garage, provided each employee with a scan card to gain access to the garage and instructed all employees to park on the garage's third level. On January 29, 2010, the petitioner parked her car in the parking garage and, as she was crossing the street, was struck by a car and severely injured.

The petitioner filed a claim with the Division of Workers' Compensation seeking medical and indemnity benefits. The respondent denied that the accident arose out of and in the course of the petitioner's employment and invoked N.J.S.A. 34:15-36 of the Workers' Compensation Act. This so-called "premises rule" provides that:

Employment shall be deemed to commence when an employee arrives at the employer's place of employment to report for work and shall terminate when the employee leaves the employer's place of employment, excluding areas not under the control of the employer.

The respondent argued that the garage was neither owned nor operated by the respondent and that, even if it was, the petitioner's accident did not occur in the garage, but on a public street over which the respondent exercised no control.

At the conclusion of trial, the Judge of Compensation found that the petitioner's accident was compensable as it happened after she had arrived at the parking garage designated for her use by the respondent. The Judge of Compensation rejected the respondent's contention that the petitioner was no longer in the course of her employment when she entered the public street. "Because the employer chose a parking location that required petitioner to cross a busy thoroughfare," the Judge of Compensation noted, "petitioner consequently lost the ability to decide where she wanted to park and assess the risks herself." The respondent appealed.

In affirming the Judge of Compensation's ruling, the Appellate Division relied on Livingstone v. Abraham and Strauss, Inc., 111 N.J. 89 (1988), in which the court found that an employee's parking lot accident was compensable because her workday commenced when she arrived in her car at the section of the mall-owned parking lot adjacent to her employer's premises. The employer, a tenant in a large shopping mall, required its employees to park at the outer edge of the lot so that customers could park closer to the store. The fact that the employer did not own, maintain or have exclusive control of the parking lot did not preclude the accident from being compensable as the Livingstone Court reasoned that the term "control," as used in N.J.S.A. 34:15-36, must be interpreted as simply "use by the employer in the conduct of his business."

Applying the principle of Livingstone, the Appellate Division found that the petitioner's accident was compensable under the Act. Although the garage and the sidewalk en route to the workplace were not part of the workplace in a physical sense, the respondent exercised control over these areas by designating the third floor of the garage for its employees. "[As] the employer's control extended the workplace premises to the Cattano [Avenue] garage," the Appellate Division concluded, "when petitioner parked her car in the assigned garage, she was not coming to work, she had arrived there."

Case Law Alert - 4th Qtr 2012